Why Do People Still Work At Yahoo!?

An honest question deserves an honest answer. Professionals evaluate their job condition regularly. People stay or leave companies for many reasons. Staying is usually a function of their current satisfaction and their growth opportunities. Leaving is usually a function of dissatisfaction with their management coupled with a better place to go. Changing jobs is a hassle (interviews, ramp-up, 401K, uncertainty, loss of seniority, etc.). So most people don’t change more often than needed.

The “your company is no longer cool according to silicon valley bloggers” is only a good reason to leave if you joined it to keep up with the fashion trends as dictated by others. If however, you joined for any other reason (e.g. interest in your work topic, growth opportunity, good compensation, meaningful opportunity to make a difference in the company, etc.) then the coolness factor is just not a big factor. In fact, I think that the coolness watchers got it backwards. Yahoo! never made me cool, I have been making Yahoo! cool. See this to get more context about what I mean by that statement.

The real question here is should you leave a company that is under turmoil? You have to first consider if your company is really under turmoil? I’ll assure you of this — bloggers are good about telling you the truth, but they don’t do a good job of “the whole truth” or “nothing but the truth.” Read news with skepticism. What you read is partially true, and it’s spun in a way to attract attention and convey a believable story, not an exposition of facts. (After all, bloggers just want your eyeballs, they are not held to the same fact-verification standards of journalists — who also just want your eyeballs.) To have an accurate assessment if your company is really in turmoil you have to look at more data (some of which is public but ignored by the press, and some is not public). Do yourself a favor, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet, just half. Which half? That’s up to you. But a mature professional assess a situation using data and critical thinking, not trending-topic watching.

But let’s say your company is indeed in trouble. Do you leave? It depends. Some people leave, and I can’t blame them if they are going to a better job. But there is a strategy to play when staying in company under change (where there is churn, but hope for recovery). There are new opportunities every day in these environments. In my case, two levels of management above me are gone — I shot up from N levels from the top to N-2 levels from the top. And given the leadership gap, I have a lot more empowerment to do the good job I was doing, with much less resistance. My new boss is fantastic (I’m not just saying this, people who know me know that I have not always been super-pleased with some facets of my management chain over the years). The wisdom of financial asset managers echo in my mind: “buy low, sell high” and “ invest in fundamental value not in market timing” and these messages hint to look for the turnaround opportunities, not the flavor of the month companies.

Consider now if you followed your own bias, and left a company in duress. Let’s script your next job interview with me and see how it plays out:

“So why did you leave your last job?” “Well, the company was in turmoil. Bloggers were getting very nasty and attacking the company, and the comments on the blogs were really bad too. I felt demoralized working there.” “So if it fair to say that if we hired you and we ran into some turbulence, we should expect you to jump ship too?” “<crickets chirping>… um no… I’d do my best to .. um help… um… <chirp>”

I would not hire you if I thought that you were the kind of employee who was only going to stick around when everyone else kept the company afloat, but would leave when we really needed smart, dedicated talent to lead us away from a storm. I would perceive this behavior as a character flaw and a job disqualification. I’d only want to hire people who are willing to put up a good fight, not people who can’t handle the tough times. Tough times happen. Certainty is luxury we can’t always afford. No one hires a lifeguard who is afraid to get wet. Working in a multi-billion, multi-national giant is not a spectator sport. I’d hire people who are there to play to win, not watch to quit.

Now there are some problems that go beyond bad press. I left a company many years ago when I realized they were unethical. It was a simple choice for me. I was not going to work at a place that crossed the line where they mistreated customers and employees. If that was the case here, it would be a different story. The Microsoft deal is old news (and we crafted a different deal anyway). The patent suit is in active litigation, so I cannot comment on it, other than imply that I don’t see this as an unethical act but a business and legal negotiation that spilled into court. And the “resume malfunction” is also an active situation where we don’t have all the data or know what will happen. Let’s hope this is resolved quickly and properly. Whereas the actual facts behind the bio error have not been made too clear as of today, the effects are in motion and Yahoo! has a new interim CEO replacing Scott. Yet these are resolvable issues, you know. Frustrating, yes. But terribly demoralizing? no, not for me or for thousands of employees who come to work to work in a generally good environment. Again, I must admit that this has been a frustrating time at Yahoo!. And we live with unknowns — as do people who work at many companies. My point is that blogosphere-popularity is not the way to manage a career, and that although Yahoo employees are concerned, we are also professionals. We come to work to do a job — a job we plan on continuing to do under new leadership, however this plays out.

People leave, and people join. One day I’ll leave too. But today, I come into work today seeing a huge growth opportunity for me personally and professionally. We have many problems to solve with many assets at our disposal to solve them. What more could I ask for? If we succeed, we exceed expectations. That’s a very attractive set up.

Let me add one more idea here: innovation experts will tell you that you have to be willing to make many mistakes if you want to be successful. One thing for sure, my company has been willing to make mistakes in the quest for success. And when you look at the raw data — the hundreds of millions of users, properties that are #1, #2, or #3 in their categories, and solid financials, you can see that many of the mistakes paid off. We’re not as good at learning from the mistakes and cleaning up the little messes here and there. We’ll get better at that. Perfection is elusive. But we have moxie. Working at a company that’s willing to forge into unknowns and emerge with real successes is actually pretty exciting. As the motto goes: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

If the industry puts their thinking caps back on for a few moments, they’d realize they should be rooting for Yahoo!’s growth and success — as this company has been a very beneficial force to the overall health of the Internet technology landscape. Use your critical thinking skills and you’ll see the current technology Balkanization trends in the hottest technology areas (e.g. mobile, big data, and cloud) and how companies like Yahoo! are keeping the markets open.

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